Sunday, February 24, 2008

Awright. Enough With The Nice.

I'm naming this little fella Raph, in honour of my favourite self impressed twat that isn't Stephen Harper.

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19 comments:

Raphael Alexander said...

Funny. Here's a kiss for you, PSA.

11:57 PM
Lindsay Stewart said...

Aw poor Raffles. The conservative mole doesn't feel loved. Back to your burrow sniveler. Time to use the spanking you took tonight to fire up another delicately worded essay on how feminists have wrecked marriage or how them dirty foreigners have wrecked the good old white neighbourhoods or maybe you've finished your masterpiece about how we progressives are mired in lunacy. You poor, sad attention whore, nobody wants to play with the nicest bigot in town any more. It ain't too late to mend fences with your pals in the BTs, you can get back in line for a chance to suck wash Kate's chaps. There's a clever l'il thing, piss off now. Shoo.

12:15 AM
Raphael Alexander said...

PSA, I'd say you're all style and no substance, but that would imply you had any style. Enjoy your cowardly echo chamber. Don't forget to believe every conspiracy theory, and keep those Harper and Bush hating fires burning. They'll leave office some day. I promise. Until then, cry gentle progressive tears into your porridge buttercup.

12:20 AM
Dave said...

Is that a naturally pink animal?

2:01 AM
Rev.Paperboy said...

Raph, doorknob, ass, way out --- you know the drill by now numbnuts.

5:23 AM
thwap said...

I hate bush II too. What's not to hate?

The guy's lazily destroyed the lives of millions of people. He's a threat to democracy?

Can't expect RA to understand this. I once protested the torture of Omar Kadhr, erroneously typing that he was 14. RA replied that I was trying to twist things in order to give him more sympathy than he deserved. Omar was 15 when he was being tortured, so that made it all okey-dokey.

What are you supposed to say after that?

5:25 AM
Red Tory said...

Cute name, but for me, "Raffles" always conjures up the image of a suave British mountebank gliding through the exotic milieu of a Malay Sultanate in a cool white suit sipping a gin-laced sling at the long bar...

Please don't ruin that for me.

7:50 AM
Lindsay Stewart said...

okay red, ruffles it is, the snuffling dandy, forever put off that a mote of dust or an untoward shaft of light might besmirch his delicate countenance. better?

8:23 AM
Ti-Guy said...

I don't know why some people have so much invested in beliefs that aren't based on much (if any) real-world evidence. Christ, there's more evidence to suggest that modern conservatism really is proto-fascism, but I don't believe it has to be.

If we want to throw out hypotheses suggesting new secular "religions," neoconservatism fits that bill, no question about it. Everything about it requires a leap of faith.

Raphael: That way lies madness. Please...read more widely.

9:09 AM
Red Tory said...

PSA — Much better. Thanks.

I do have to say however that I think you guys are being awfully harsh on the poor fellow. Disagree with him all you want — and often quite rightly so — but considering he's actually willing to engage in discussion, don't you think that perhaps you might want to cut him some slack with regards to the bombast, invective and ad homs, and instead deal more substantively with his frequently problematic ideas on their own relative merits?

Just a suggestion...

9:40 AM
E in MD said...

Now showing in a nightmare near you.

9:48 AM
Lindsay Stewart said...

sorry red but ruffles has out worn his welcome. he's only willing to engage in discussion as long as he's pulling the civility wool over people's eyes. when he's called on his bullshit he lashes out. go back through threads at the beaver and see the open contempt he has for dave and the folks there.

he likes to put on his politically correct hat and concern troll the leftosphere, fine. he gets no quarter from me when he spouts off rude to my friends and i refuse to engage in his charade of civility when he uses it to gloss over his anti-feminist, anti-immigrant bigotry and ignorance.

i don't care how carefully he polishes his turds, he still reeks of shit. he crossed the line last night and he got kicked for his trouble. predictably that set off the whining and evasion and a comically overblown, hysterical post chock full of words he either doesn't understand or just misuses out of laziness. press the reset button, wait a week and it will all happen again.

10:08 AM
Ti-Guy said...

I agree with Red, only because I deserately need one...just one Conservative to talk to without retching all the time (my 80 year-old father-in-law is voting Green in the next election...now look what the Harpies have done?) in order to believe the World will make sense at some point.

Raphe also gets a really hard time when he takes on the righties. I'm cutting him some slack, but I won't argue that here.

10:43 AM
thwap said...

I'm with PSA on this one. Let him come and talk if he wants to, if you must, but civility? Undeserved.

10:47 AM
Red Tory said...

PSA — Fair enough, I guess. I haven’t gotten to the end of my rope yet, so we’ll see how it goes.

11:23 AM
Lindsay Stewart said...

just as a note red, he pointed at you as a lefty source who he cites as follows:

"Dave, your article was a ridiculous piece of crap that even fellow progressives think was over the top lunacy."

after being asked on who might be calling him the author of crap and lunacy:

"Dave, Red Tory has already criticized you."

that's a pretty big bunch of words he popped in your mouth. now, i ventured over to see the histrionics and i read your comments. i didn't see you calling dave a lunatic though i did understand your difference with the position stated in the post at the beaver. from a professional marketing standpoint, i could see taking the path of least resistance. women have been targeted in this sort of marketing for years, why change to suit a shifting social landscape until you're forced to?

raphael would have stood a better chance had he framed his argument from a professional standpoint. it wouldn't make the argument true or correct but it would have been better than attacking dave and cheryl on their own blog. i'll note for the record that raphael was the first out of the blocks with the ad homs and personal insults. he reaps what he sows.

as for the marketing angle, i don't see it as cause and effect. the marketers don't go after women because they care more about the safety of their family. its a frickin' survival kit. that sounds like manly tough guy stuff to me. perpetuating the fallacy that men are incapable or don't care about the pesky women's tasks of protecting the household and caring for the family doesn't serve anyone well. i think that is what was being noted at the beaver. there's no good reason to continue slicing the market along fading gender lines other than laziness on the part of marketeers. the reaction raphael got at the beaver was indicative of that. he got slapped about by men and women, none of whom ascribe to his dated notions of gender dynamics.

he's on record as attacking gender equity issues and demonizing feminists. maybe that plays at work for now but the world is shifting in social arrangements and roles. if it doesn't suit his retrograde tastes, tough.

2:12 PM
Red Tory said...

PSA — Well, that’s rather interesting. I did say that I thought the original post was needlessly over the top (“inflammatory” was the expression used, as I recall), but I most certainly didn’t make any suggestion of lunacy. To be honest, the “issue” (such as it was) just struck me as a bit silly — much ado about nothing — perhaps a good excuse to take a malicious poke at Stockwell Day, but otherwise really not worth much fuss or bother. And the rhetoric in the comments did strike me as being excessively nasty and quite surprisingly vituperative.

Raphael seems quite perplexed by the reaction he manages to provoke and I told him that I wouldn’t discuss that aspect of the matter in the comments, so I’ll hold to same principle here, save to say, that he does seem to have a peculiar knack for digging a hole for himself (e.g., the dubious assertion that women are somehow more inherently “caring” for the welfare of their children because they heat baby bottles to just the right temperature and provide specialized snacks for the kiddy-winks is something that any sentient person should realize might trigger an indignant backlash from many men, and especially single fathers, or for that matter, even women who might be inclined to regard it as more than a little bit patronizing).

As for the marketing angle, I’d just say that I don’t believe it’s the government’s role to change social attitudes in this regard with one advertising campaign and a relatively modest budget. Therefore, it’s only prudent for them to skew their PSA message in the direction of what is demonstrably the most desirable target market in this instance. And by “desirable” I simply mean the one that will most likely give them the best “bang for their buck” and be the most likely to produce the end-results being sought after. I don’t think it’s really necessary to get into a lot of sociological heavy-lifting to support that point — there’s plenty of evidence to demonstrate that women are the prime movers and decision-makers when it comes to matters of home security and sustaining the domestic front where couples are concerned. That’s true irrespective of whether both parents work full time, by the way. It’s common knowledge (but also verifiable by countless surveys of the obvious) that women generally carry a disproportionate share of the domestic load and that’s just the plain fact of the matter. As to the reasons why this is so, well, that’s another matter altogether beyond the ambit of this particular discussion.

Is there some “laziness” in the marketing community when it comes to this sort of thing? You bet there is! For all our notoriously spendthrift ways and slipshod pseudo-science, at the end of the day, we like to make relatively safe bets with our clients' investement. You might characterize it as segmentation along “fading gender lines” but that’s an exaggeration based perhaps more on wishful thinking than empirical evidence. While there is certainly a good deal more diversity in the composition of families these days, they still preponderantly weigh heavily towards what might be described as the conventional nuclear unit. And again, marketers work on safe bets… averages and lowest common denominators.

Anyway, enough of my rambling… I just wanted to clarify my position for the record, so there’s no confusion based on someone else’s interpretation of what I actually said and/or intended. And in that respect, I’m going to cross-post this comment over at GB.

4:02 PM
Dave said...

RT, your comment over at TGB was truncated by HaloScan. I hope you don't mind but I'll simply explain that in our comments section and direct readers here.

FWIW, I was reading your comments and was fully aware of what you had written... and that those comments were being abused in both language and context.

7:08 PM
Red Tory said...

Dave — Thanks for your understanding.

9:41 PM

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